Norway's biggest oil company, Statoil, are developing an old gas field in an area 125 km form the Norwegian coast. This doesn't seem to be a "leap forward" until we look at the technology they are using to exploit the resource. The company have built a series of compressors to extract the gass from the hydrocarbon trap, compress it and pump it to a plant onshore, but these installations are sunk and placed on the sea bed - there is no platform at the sea surface and they are operated remotely. This does give the possibility of exploiting hydrocarbon reserves in deep water or in places like the Arctic Ocean that are very challenging places to put conventional rigs or to develop smaller traps.
The controversy comes from the tension between the undoubted commercial benefit from extracting and selling the gas - Norway os one of the richest countries in the world because if geological resources like this - and the environmental impact of producing an using the hydrocarbons.
It is a hugely impressive engineering achievement (and it does present on opportunity to further the development of carbon capture and storage) but is it worth the environmental cost?
No comments:
Post a Comment